Tuesday, December 25, 2007

E.J. Dionne tries really hard to transcend the current ideological polarization, and to resurrect the link between the "left" (whatever that means) and Christianity. The crucial question probably should be: is Mr. Dionne's hope based on anything present? Because if it is not it quickly degenerates into some utopian ideology, as the experience of the last two centuries has abundantly shown.

Monday, December 24, 2007

The truth about the current situation in higher education is revealed at the very last sentence in this article: namely, the desirable goal is having prestigious, cutting-edge scientific reseach, but not education (even in the sciences).

Friday, December 21, 2007

Michael Gerson has a good column, which incidentally shows how the best evangelical minds more and more have to fall back on the Catholic intellectual tradition in order to face the current cultural meltdown:

"Because science has not found something which obviously it could not find, therefore something entirely different . . . is untrue. . . . To me it is all wild and whirling; as if a man said -- 'The plumber can find nothing wrong with our piano; so I suppose that my wife does love me.' " (G.K. Chesterton)

Sunday, December 16, 2007

Robert Kaplan is an attentive observer of how the military reflects social trends. In this case, he is correct in detecting that the major weakness of Western societies is the inability to achieve certainty.

Thursday, December 13, 2007

Sweden is to the early XXI century what the Soviet Union was to the mid-XX century: the guiding light of ideological purity. Except, the new ideology is destructive in a much different and subtler way...

Tuesday, December 11, 2007

The very fact that Philip Pullman does not find the "great questions" in Tolkien sheds some light on the nature of contemporary atheism. The central themes of the "The Lord of the Rings" are the necessity of death, the passing of beauty so that it can be saved, the renounciation of power for the sake of love. That these are RELIGIOUS questions is simply inconceivable from Pullman's standpoint, since religion is not associated with the experience of beauty and love but with moralistic power. People like him can only think of salvation in juridical, not onthological terms. In other words, they are Protestant atheists. They rebel against the God of late European Christianity, but it is still the only one they can imagine.

Half of the crimes were committed by men of Moroccan origin and researchers believe they felt stigmatized by society and responded by attacking people they felt were lower on the social ladder. Another working theory is that the attackers may be struggling with their own sexual identity.

Of course, there is no reason to think that many Moroccans may despise and dislike homosexuals.

Saturday, December 01, 2007

Thursday, November 29, 2007

The Blair controversy is kind of interesting. On one hand, of course, only God knows anybody's faith. On the other hand, one is left with the feeling that there is something missing here. Not moral consistency (who can claim that?), but rather a clear link to an authority, to an "other" that makes Christianity an objective reality.

Otherwise...everything will remain at the level of "opinion" and the decisive criterion will always be of their choosing, whereas the drama of conversion is to feel oneself called back to an objective Truth...and to acknowledge the concrete presence of a reality that is Christ's mystery in history, in the Church. (The Journey to truth is an experience, p. 89)

Wednesday, November 28, 2007

Sunday, November 25, 2007

Sometimes crazy people reveal the logical conclusion of very widespread fallacies, in this case the environmentalist ideology. In truth, nature has value because there are people who can appreciate its beauty. Without people, the earth could turn into a desert tomorrow and it would not make any difference.

Monday, November 19, 2007

A typical "liberal" predicament: how do you maintain that people are "equal" if you don't believe that they are "created equal?" Perhaps you should not let "science" dictate silly notions of what is important in a human person (in this case, IQ test scores).

Saturday, November 17, 2007

John Allen reports an interesting discussion among the US bishops that culminates in the following question by Cardinal George:

Is religion an independent variable? Or is it simply reduced to a cultural reality that can be explained in terms of something other than religion itself?

The most striking part is that Cardinal George says that he "does not know the answer." Not even regarding Christianity? Clearly, he was just being very diplomatic, but he should be careful lest people think that this kind of question can really be settled by the sociologists...

Thursday, November 15, 2007

This essay makes some valid points. First, that some of the responses to the abuse scandal in the Church have been driven precisely by the same (non-Catholic) mentality that made the scandal possible in the first place. Second, that the first responsibility of the Church is to be the Church.

The Church failed to protect children from sexual abuse. Bad as that was, there is worse, since protecting children is not an end in itself for the Church. From a Catholic point of view, when people are abused in the Church, they may be torn from the life of the Church, whose teaching and sacraments they need. Disillusioned and alienated, they may take scandal according to Guardini’s definition, and reject for secondary reasons what should be affirmed for primary reasons.

For internet junkies, Ms. Snow is the mother of The Atlantic Magazine's blogger Ross Douthat.

Wednesday, November 14, 2007

Peter Berkowitz is correct that there is something strange about the extreme hatred many people feel for President Bush, which cannot be fully explained just by a politician's shortcomings. It probably points to a situation in which many people are not certain and confident about their own ideals and find strength, purpose and psycological reassurance in having some mithically bad person to hate and despise. This dynamics produces the most violent possible people, much more violent than those who are peaceful and secure in their cultural/religious identity.

Rosmini was a great Christian thinker, even if he is unknown in the English-speaking world. He is also a reminder of how the word "liberalism" used to have a completely different meaning in Continental Europe.

Monday, November 05, 2007

Sunday, November 04, 2007

The Economist has a long series of articles on "religion" in the contemporary world. They are not terrible, but they lack a unifying criterion in order to judge what's going on. What is universal and explanatory are the religious questions (the "religious sense"), whereas there is not really much to be learnt in general by describing religious answers. But the fact that human beings ARE a need for meaning seems to escape this fine specimen of British empiricism.

“Popular culture” is more accurately a “present-tense culture”: You’re celebrating the millennium but you can barely conceive of anything before the mid-1960s. We’re at school longer than any society in human history, entering kindergarten at four or five and leaving college the best part of a quarter-century later—or thirty years later in Germany. Yet in all those decades we exist in the din of the present.

Sunday, October 28, 2007

Ryan Lizza is a brilliant writer with a knack for grasping what really motivates a politician. In this case, Romney is indeed a good example of the core appeal of Mormonism, which does not lie in its quite peculiar doctrines, but in the attraction of a wholesome and successful life

I want you to understand, the Lord does not care whether you become rich or not, but he does want you to learn how to succeed, and to be successful.

Perhaps. But the Lord's idea of success (also known as sanctity) is certainly greater than excelling as a business consultant, having a nice family and becoming president of the US of A.

Wednesday, October 24, 2007

Michael Gerson makes a decent point (modern liberalism places great faith in "science," but "science" per se can be twisted into very illiberal philosophical positions). It starts a bizarre flood of hatred (literally) in the comments section (Gerson was a speechwriter for Bush).

Sunday, October 14, 2007

One characteristic of the dominant liberal post-marxist ideology is that it is unable to recognize that other ideologies matter. At most, those who have not yet joined our wonderful bourgeois life-style are just subjects for "cultural studies" departments.

Thursday, October 04, 2007

Wednesday, October 03, 2007

Actually, Huckabee does sound like an "authentic" politician, in the sense of expressing a genuine strand of American popular (Evangelical) culture (even including the weight loss part). In an increasingly ideological age, one can certainly do worse.

Friday, September 21, 2007

In spite of some interesting insights, the idea of moral psycology is somewhat comical. The bottom line is that you cannot understand anything about human beings if you leave out (or reduce) their two most obvious (an mysterious) features: reason and freedom. The last sentence is downright funny, because the guy is clearly being very bold:

“It is at least possible,” he said, “that conservatives and traditional societies have some moral or sociological insights that secular liberals do not understand.”

For that matter, it is also at least possible that secular liberals do not understand much about anything. After all, what they think they understand is just what is written in their genes.

Wednesday, September 19, 2007

This essay raises a valid question (why our educational system systematically censors the great questions about life?) but offers inadequate answers (the great books? the university as an alternative to religion?). The problem is NOT one of religious indoctrination, but one of method. How can one face these questions reasonably? The absence of "meaning" from education is just a reflection of the reduction of reason that the Pope denounced in his Regensburg address. Reason coincides with the methods of empirical science, and empirical science knows no meaning, so what's there to teach? In particular, the humanities must by logical necessity become the domain of pure relativism and unbridled instinctivity.

Thursday, September 13, 2007

There is a striking difference between a newspaper offering balanced political judgements and a bunch of politicians using a newspaper. Of course, the first course is smarter because it gives you authority (which the Post has been steadily gaining) while the second course is self-destructive (who cares to read the New York Times editorial page any more?)

Saturday, September 08, 2007

Slate has noticed the obvious: that Islamism is a self-standing totalitarian ideology (in the mold of the European ideologies that started after the time of the French revolution) and not something related to specific political issues in the Middle East.

Radical Islamism seems to have become the magnet for some of the world's angriest people who feel the universe is out of joint and must be changed. For these converts, it is an ideology of revolt that is more attractive because of its crystalline hatred of the status quo than its theology.

Thursday, September 06, 2007

It is true that the Duke University rape case says something about the current cultural elites. In particular, about their costant desire and fantasy of being part of the civil right battles of the previous generation. This is probably for many people a way to escape from the grim reality of being philosophical nihilists, by creating an imaginary moral high-ground for themselves. Clearly, such a position is so detached from reality that it can easily become extremely violent.

Friday, August 24, 2007

One could argue that, historically, the major factor that motivated the existence of Belgium as a bi-national state was shared Catholicism. Apparently, the ideology of the multicultural welfare state will not do it...

Monday, July 30, 2007

Alexander Solzhenitsyn on the crimes of history in an interview with Der Spiegel: "We should clearly understand that only the voluntary and conscientious acceptance by a people of its guilt can ensure the healing of a nation. Unremitting reproaches from outside, on the other hand, are counterproductive." On Russia and the West: "...one can see a time in the 21st century when both Europe and the USA will be in dire need of Russia as an ally."

Friday, July 27, 2007

It is not as fashionable as global warming, but more urgent: Christians in Iraq have become an endangered species. "I realized that 36 of my congregation in that past week had been kidnapped. None of them have been returned."

Tuesday, July 24, 2007

Can a person be at once fully modern and fully faithful to his tradition? Noah Feldman asks this question in this piece about his Orthodox Jewish background. Pope Benedict answers in his letter to bishops about the older form of the Mass: "What earlier generations held as sacred, remains sacred and great for us too, and it cannot be all of a sudden entirely forbidden or even considered harmful."

Sunday, July 15, 2007

Christians in Iraq have no militias, no political parties. George Weigel brings up the life and death of Fr. Raheed Ganni, murdered on June 3. For more about Fr. Raheed and the precarious situation of Christians in Iraq see the coverage by AsiaNews.

Wednesday, July 11, 2007

The real question is: why on earth would anyone think that the writer of the book of Jeremiah would have made-up Nebo-Sarsekim? In other words, there is more ground to doubt the reasonableness of some followers of the historical-critical method than to doubt the veracity of most biblical accounts.

Freeman Dyson is a great scientist with some religious leanings. His view of the future shows two typical features of our time: a) the idea that civilization boils down to material development (no need to address the question "What is a human being?"); b) a naive lack of awareness about the reality of sin .

“Most kids coming into the Army today have never worn leather shoes in their life unless it said Nike, Adidas, or Timberland. They’ve never run two miles consecutively in their life, and for the most part they hadn’t had an adult tell them ‘no’ and mean it. That’s bizarre,” says an officer in charge of training today's generation of new recruits.

Sunday, June 24, 2007

Jeff Jacoby highlights the hypocrisy of those who accuse the president's position on embryonic stem cells of being ideological, whereas they themselves turn "science" into an ideology. The quotes by the Democratic leaders are astounding. The identification of reason with "science" is the current Western way to philosophical nihilism, and its embrace by the Democratic party is more important than how many "Catholic issues" they are willing to support.

Tuesday, June 12, 2007

Rorty advocated a form of liberalism that is pure negation--the vacuum that is left over once people stop believing that any "truth" (always in scare quotes) is worth killing or dying for. In Rorty's view, we are all (or should be) liberals in this sense--not out of conviction or principle, but by default, because of the absence or unavailability of any competing conviction or principle.

. We are curious to see how long a society can last on such solid cultural foundations.

Monday, June 11, 2007

Last week's essay by Paul Berman in the New Republic is worth reading. Spengler makes an interesting comment on the relationship between modern totalitarianism and paganism, understood as a creed in which the individual only exists for the sake of the state (or the tribe or the race):

Rosenzweig...described Islam as pagan, and Allah as an apotheosized despot. He began, that is, with a general characterization of pagan society, that is, society in the absence of God's self-revelation through love, and then considered Islam as a specific case of a paganism that parodies the outward form of revealed religion. God's self-revelation as an act of love first makes possible human individuality: the individual human is an individual precisely because he is loved.

Panned initially for being too pessimistic about the future, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World now appears remarkably prescient in its portrayal of a world of universal promiscuity, mass consumerism, and birth separated from procreation. Though the work celebrates its 75th anniversary this year, it seems few critics have succeeded in discerning Huxley's real message: an attack on “the new spirit which tries to induce man… to abandon the practice of speculating about his existence and his destiny.”

Tuesday, June 05, 2007

The New Republic has been publishing some excerpts from Paul Berman's new book on the generation of 1968. The most striking fact is how ideology led this people to a complete neglect of their humanity. The logical outcome was nihilism, either serious (suicide) or unserious (Cohn-Bendit).

Occasionally one is reminded of the naivete of the liberal post-enlightment delusion that certain values are universal across cultures just because WE have been taught to recognize them as universal in principle.

His classic Fahrenheit 451 tells of a dystopian future of mass book burnings and groups of people who retreat from the cities to memorize whole texts so as to carry human culture through a new dark age. For over 40 years critics have called it a novel about government censorship. Now the author wants us to know that the intellectuals were wrong. The problem was never censorship-- it was television.

Monday, May 28, 2007

This rather chilling article from the St. Petersburg Times gives an idea of the dangerous state of flux that characterizes public education. In devastated areas of Louisiana Scientology advocates like Tom Cruise and John Travolta have introduced their methods into public schools. The moral of the story: when education is divorced from tradition and simply becomes a matter of "skills" and "techniques" students are vulnerable to manipulation by the rich and powerful.In case you were wondering, Scientology's "study technology" program is headquartered in the former retirement home of a Catholic religious order near St. Luis. Read more...

Tuesday, May 01, 2007

Monday, April 23, 2007

Lots of theories keep being produced about the VT mass murderer. Some of the comments by Camille Paglia are somewhat interesting, inasmuch she understands that people's most vulnerable spot is their affectivity (which she confuses with sex).

Sunday, April 22, 2007

It is true that our culture is swamped with moralism. But the reason is not just an historical quirk, it is what the Pope in Regensburg called "reduction of reason." If morality is separated from knowledge and reason (the human quest for meaning), all that is left is arbitrary power...

Thursday, April 19, 2007

The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle. To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is something that our minds cannot grasp, whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly: this is religiousness.

Thursday, April 05, 2007

We have often wondered about the naive faith in the benefits of technology which has swept the education words over the last ten years. The truth is that spending billions in computing equipment is relatively easy, while forming good teachers is very hard. It is even harder when there is not much philosophical clarity about what it means to educate.

who never had a Catholic thought in his whole life. Joshka Fisher is so representative of the 1968 generation in Europe:a) A Catholic.b) Who was taught a completely moralistic understanding of his faith (still today he identifies Catholicism with a Manichean good vs. evil world view).c) Who thus embraced a utopian ideology completely removed from the realistic Catholic view of the human condition (Glucksmann is right!).

Thursday, March 29, 2007

Amir Taheri notices that foreign policy experts in the US are affected by domestic political allegiances to a very significant degree. This probably reflects the fact that the key foreign policy jobs are assigned by political appointment, rather than just seniority in the diplomatic corps. Of course, this can have harmful effects.

It is a sign of how reason has been reduced in our culture that we take seriously psycologists when they "discover" the most obvious things about human nature. Hey, they are SCIENTISTS! They are "studying meaning" from a SCIENTIFIC standpoint! They PROVED that humans want "to feel we're significant beings in a meaningful world." The Chicago Tribune never suspected that before.

Tuesday, March 27, 2007

The scientist('s)...religious feeling takes the form of a rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law, which reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection. This feeling is the guiding principle of his life and work, in so far as he succeeds in keeping himself from the shackles of selfish desire.

Friday, February 02, 2007

traditional religious groups essentially must either abandon any religious beliefs that conflict with the ideologies of the state, notably that of radical feminism, or cease to make any claims to special financial considerations for their charitable, non-profit works for the community.

Tuesday, January 30, 2007

I think what’s at stake ultimately is whether the church is answerable finally to the State as the only court of appeal or whether the church can rightly appeal to other sources for its moral compass and whatever one’s views on this particular issue.

Monday, January 29, 2007

Sunday, January 28, 2007

The article by David Cameron, the British Conservative leader, is very symbolic of the time we are living. It means to be a philosophical statement, yet there is not one discernible idea (teaching English to everybody? That's it?). It is obsessed with identity, yet it shows a complete lack of it. In fact, it does not distinguish itself in any way from the opposite political side. When both sides have coalesced into complete cultural vacuum, what's left in democracy?

Thursday, January 25, 2007

The spanking controversy is another example of disappearing common sense (in the literal sense: a set of shared judgements based on real-life experience and passed on, often implicitly, from a generation to the next.)

Tuesday, January 23, 2007

Sunday, January 21, 2007

The Tablet has a story on the booming phenomenon of avatars (having an alternative self living in an imaginary digital universe). The problem, however, is not how Christianity can be a better "imaginative option." The question is whether Christianity can help us live reality so that don't feel the need to escape from it.

Friday, January 05, 2007

It is true: the recent wave of atheists seem to be at the same time more ignorant and presumptuous than their predecessors. This partly due to the shallowness of what passes for "scientific" education.

Thursday, January 04, 2007

Wednesday, January 03, 2007

The pervasive, moralistic anger in our public life is an obvious sign of a weak human fabric and of progressive detachment from reality, in which the person becomes

a ghostlike figure, perpetually in search of “something solid against which it can prove its own existence.” New Anger, Wood concludes, “is the desperately intense effort of these ghosts to feel real.”

For good examples of dogmatic, unquestioning, utterly moralistic and irrational anger, you can always rely on the editorial page of the Boston Globe. The possibility that people who disagree with them may have motives other than bigotry and ignorance never, ever arises. No fundamental questions (What are "rights?" Where do they come from? What is marriage?) are ever asked.